Grim Dawn is an indie ARPG that’s fresh off the Early Access train. I had… well, I’m not exactly going to call them high hopes, but at least a reasonable expectation that Grim Dawn wouldn’t suck, as developers Crate Entertainment were formed from the remnants of Titan Quest developer Iron Lore¹, and Titan Quest is pretty well regarded as far as ARPGs go. As usual with ARPGs I roped in my usual co-op partner Kenti to play through the campaign with me. The good news is that we had absolutely no problems with the netcode; after a year in Early Access Grim Dawn’s co-op is solid as a rock. The bad news is, unfortunately, everything else.

Hentzau: Let’s talk a little bit about Titan Quest first. This was a mythical Greek-themed ARPG that I dabbled in for a few hours but which largely passed me by – I didn’t even get to it until a good 3-4 years after it came out. I believe you spent a bit more time in it Kenti?

Kenti: I did, yes. In a large part because it is indeed Greek Mythology-themed (and Roman, and Egyptian and Chinese… but not really Norse I guess… or was that in the expansion?)

Hentzau: Even with my limited experience of it I can see that Grim Dawn isn’t really a spiritual successor to Diablo 2, it’s a direct successor to Titan Quest.

Kenti: Yes, but without any of its charm – and with a generic fantasy (maybe with a touch of generic steampunk) setting to replace the slightly-less-common mythology one.

Hentzau: I’m not even sure what is going on with the setting! It’s supposed to be post-apocalypse (the titular Grim Dawn) but you never really get an impression of that in game. Both mechanically and thematically it comes across as a standard fantasy land overrun with monsters. That guy on all the promo art with the witch hunter hat and the pistols? That’s about as far as Grim Dawn is willing to step outside of typical fantasy tropes of warriors and mages and shamans – and even then it’s just stealing one from somewhere else.

Kenti: We’ve all played your Van Helsings and Victor Vrans – so of course there are guns and science and whatnot as well. Apparently that is THE theme for smaller indie ARPGs these days. Anyway, enough about the setting – it’s generic, and it’s a step back, but we didn’t exactly mind it that much when we enjoyed Victor Vran – it merely compounds other issues with the game.

Hentzau:  True. It’s an ARPG, so I’m not going to hold a weak setting against it too much as long as it gets the hitting of monsters and the loot right. Unfortunately there’s some bad news there too.

Kenti: The loot piñata is not satisfying.

Hentzau: Well, before we talk about loot (because that is going to be a long conversation), let’s talk about the basic gameplay: the combat, and the skills you use to mess up the hordes of bad guys who are just minding their own business until you come along. I think the combat isn’t actually too bad. Attacks feel appropriately powerful, and there’s always a lot of enemies on screen and a lot of explosions and fire as you blast them into chunky kibbles.

Kenti: I didn’t spend too much time thwacking things, but that was very meaty and fun, and shooting them is also appropriately explosive. Especially when you move on to producing a hail of bullets with a pair of pistols.

Hentzau: I should mention that we both picked the Demolitionist class (who is the hat-and-pistols guy mentioned above), this being the least generic one on offer. Also he (or she) gets to throw molotov cocktails.

Kenti: Curiously it also seemed the only obvious ranged non-mage class (though the Soldier mentions both ranged and melee skills… it felt far too generic to engage with). The others did look quite interesting too, but even with the Dual-Classing (same as in Titan Quest) there was little reason to poke too much into the secondary class. I got a forest dog thing from being a Shaman, and that was enough.

Hentzau: I tried. Because I really, really liked the Necromancer from Diablo 2 (no game since has let me summon as many skeletons at once) I thought I’d try Grim Dawn’s pet class, the Occultist, as my secondary class. You can invest points freely in either class, and so after buffing up a couple of right click abilities and auras in the Demolitionist tree I started to level up Occultist so that I could summon pets to keep the monsters at a distance while I peppered them with hot lead. Unfortunately this idea had a couple of key flaws:

• The Occultist lets you summon a grand total of two pets at once. One is a raven which just flies around and heals people. The other is a hellhound, which is much more what I was looking for.
• The problem with that, though, is that most of the good hellhound abilities were sitting towards the end of the skill tree. Which has been recycled wholesale from Titan Quest.

Kenti: Just as with Titan Quest, unfortunately the most effective way to upgrade your character is to pump the precious 3 skill points at level up into your class Mastery track. This improves your stats, and opens up the tiers of passive and active skills. If you race up the class first, you can take damage, do damage, and have mana, whereas if you try to pump much into the skills first, you’ll be very fragile and have to chug mana potions every second. A combination of the two is just about fine, but means that your character never feels powerful, and it’s a bit slower going.

Hentzau: I really can’t emphasise enough how discouraging it is to hear the level up sound effect, see a blast of light around your character and a big pop-up saying what level you’ve reached, only to then have to go and spend all of your hard-earned skill points on Mastery because that’s what you need to get the next big skill. Stat increases aside it feels like I’m throwing those points into a black hole. And if you’re going for a skill that’s some way down the tree, you end up doing this three or four levels in a row. It really takes the fun out of level ups.

Kenti: Ultimately this is the same system that was first used some 20 years ago in ARPGs, and while Titan Quest brought some interesting variation, Grim Dawn hasn’t nudged the design any further except to add a separate skill track (Devotion) which offers a slightly different, albeit confusing, path to getting stats and skills.

Hentzau: So here’s the thing I don’t get about Grim Dawn’s skill tree: you also get character points on level up that you can use to increase individual stats. This, to my mind, makes the Mastery system totally and utterly redundant. As the immediate effect of investing in the Mastery track is to increase my stats, why not just give me more character points to spend and reserve the skill points solely for, you know, increasing skills? That would have been far more interesting, since if you’re going to have that sort of boring requirement locking away the fun stuff you might as well separate it out entirely so that I can spend as little time thinking about it as possible.

Kenti: Like Hentzau, I can’t emphasise enough how boring it is to pump points into +3% damage or 0.15 increased Mana Regeneration. Especially when alternate systems have been presented and shown to work in other games (Hello Diablo 3! Hello VICTOR VRAN!) which allow you to play with exciting and meaningful skills.

Hentzau: I was wondering how far we’d get before mentioning Diablo 3.

Kenti: I think we staved it off a fair bit. Good effort! Go us!

Hentzau: But yeah, Diablo 3 is the sinister, 2001-esque monolith looming over everything Grim Dawn does. It had a rocky start but Blizzard have spent four years polishing it to the point where it is the current pinnacle of the genre. Other ARPGs have to look at it and take stock of how they can best differentiate themselves, as otherwise these comparisons are going to come up time and again and Diablo 3 is almost always going to come off best..

Kenti: Even if it’s unfair to compare Grim Dawn to Diablo, there is at least Victor Vran – which made skills equipment-based entirely, and meant that what you carried was intricately linked to what cool abilities you used (among other ideas and differentiation). Grim Dawn has tried, I suppose – you have the components you can attach to items that give you extra skills, but they all felt weak and cumbersome to me (especially as there was no easy way to upgrade them, so the use was hardly encouraged).

Hentzau: You’d have a gun that did up to 80 damage per shot, and then bolting on a… whatever it was, a fire gem thing, gave it a whopping bonus of 3-4 fire damage. And remember, we were the rapid-firing pistol class, so 80 damage is actually a really small amount since you’re attacking more quickly to make up for it. I was picking up long guns that did 200-300 damage per shot, against which the component upgrades look even more weedy.

Kenti: I do have a bone to pick with the pistol dual-wielding too. It’s cool, undoubtedly so! We both spent the majority of our playtime doing it, but bizarrely it is locked off by equipment requirements rather than anything else. Maybe it could have been a class thing, or a skill thing… but no – you had to wear a special coat or have a special badge. Fine. But it also meant that I didn’t change my chest armour for only the entire game. Very very fortunately, there was no pressing need to, because no significantly better armour ever came up that even made me seriously think about it. Look, I’ve brought it round to loot again.

Hentzau: Yeah, I think we can talk about it now, because there’s about a hundred questionable design choices around loot that mean it’s by far the weakest part of Grim Dawn. To start with, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding that players like loot, so enemies dropping more loot is automatically going to be better. Grim Dawn consequently has the loot dial turned up to eleven; a single basic named heroic monster will drop 3-5 yellow items (magic), 1-2 green items (rare) and a blue epic item about one out of every two kills, along with money, junk whites and crafting components. It gets quite comical if you come across a boss or a couple of hero monsters at once, as your screen gets almost entirely obscured by the loot pop-ups. There’s just so much of it.

Kenti: They were clearly aware on some level what they were doing – there is a specific UI button that lets you toggle which level of loot you see labelled on the ground so you can pick it up. There is clearly a need to quickly move up the tiers discarding the basic and then ordinary magical stuff.

Hentzau:  The thing is, though, that thanks to the basic laws of economics the fact that there is so much loot effectively makes it worthless. Even the greens and blues were discarded without a second thought if they weren’t straight upgrades because they just weren’t interesting, and I knew there’d be another one along in a minute.

Kenti: What could you with all this loot? Sell it? Ok, what could you do with the money? Uh… buy… some… rubbish items that were almost always worse than anything you might (occasionally) find. Money became completely meaningless a third of the way in.

Hentzau: It’s used in crafting? But hey, the game is so stingy with blueprints that I never crafted anything that wasn’t a Relic (which you can only get through crafting). Selling the loot is entirely pointless, and that’s a big problem because Grim Dawn has fucked up the other thing you do with loot in ARPGs: dismantling it to get components to craft other, better items.

Kenti: We were so excited about this. Dismantling items was shown on an early NPC you rescue, but locked off behind another quest. It was dramatic! At least we could see that there was a quest worth going on – what wonders would we be able to achieve after unlocking the hallowed dismantling power on the inventor’s apprentice?

Hentzau: Which didn’t happen until about 7-8 hours into the game. I would be willing to bet money I could complete all of Diablo 3, dire fifth act and all, in less time than it takes to unlock item dismantling in Grim Dawn. Bear in mind that up until this point all you can do with loot is sell it. It’s immensely frustrating, which makes it even more of a kick in the teeth when you do finally get access to dismantling and discover how it works.

Kenti: It required us to deliver Dynamite into the hands of said inventor (or whatever he was – his name was Kasparov). Dynamite being a very rare drop, in just a few areas of the game (mines in the ‘Wild West’ themed bit, appropriately West of where you start). It took us a while to gather the dynamite for this quest (and even more to be able to progress into other areas, including the Main Quest path). Glorious! Triumphant! We returned with the three poxy sticks of dynamite for Kasparov.

Hentzau: Only to discover that actually dismantling a single item would require a further stick of dynamite. Per item. Making it impossible to dismantle items en masse, or even at all without visiting an certain area of the map and going through a specific type of dungeon in the hope of getting a random drop that would allow us to take advantage of what (up until this point) I had always assumed was a basic feature of ARPGs.

Kenti: We ignored the system after that, because the developers clearly didn’t expect us to do much with it. I stopped picking up much loot, stopped selling it. It was such a sidelined part of the game that I don’t think it even slowed us down in terms of our ability to level up and kill increasingly tougher enemies.

Hentzau: I know I didn’t upgrade any of my stuff over the last 5-10 levels, and that was mostly fine because most of my damage came from my skills anyway.

Kenti: I guess there is something to be said for it – there’s not too much equipment churn, you get used to what you’re using and consider hard before upgrading. This would work for some other game, where monsters didn’t explode in a constant shower of stuff with meaningless prefixes and suffixes. I suppose there’s minor praise to insert at this point – much like Titan Quest, the items dropped from humanoid (and humanoid-ish) enemies tends to be based on or related to what they are wearing/carrying. So gunslingers will drop guns, cultists will drop knives and magic books etc. That’s nice. And it was nice 10 years ago in Titan Quest.

Hentzau: Honestly though, after a certain point I just started completely filtering out the loot. It was totally irrelevant except in 1% of cases.

Kenti: So: setting is generic, levelling up largely unsatisfying, looting problematic… what else has an ARPG got to offer?

Hentzau: Fantasy dress-up?

Kenti: I liked my witch-hunter hat.

Hentzau: You’d be in a minority on that one. I thought that all of the equipment in Grim Dawn looked absolutely terrible, kicking away the one last reason I might have had to pay attention to it. It’s all grey and brown and looks like it’s been hammered out of scrap metal, which might be appropriate for their GRIMDARK setting but isn’t exactly exciting to look at. It essentially reduced all of the loot to just a statline. And as we’ve established that’s nowhere near enough to make me care about it. At all.

Kenti: It’s a problem, because although abilities look pretty and exciting, lightning and fire flying everywhere, the general palette of the game is grim. With maybe some morning or dawn light colours mixed in. At last I think I understand the name…

Hentzau: Ah, we’ve looped back around to mentioning the abilities again, which is good because I have some additional criticism!

Kenti: Say it isn’t so!

Hentzau: As mentioned earlier, most of my damage came from my abilities rather than my items. This is because the way the Grim Dawn (and the Titan Quest) skill tree is set up is because it promotes overspecialisation in just 3-4 abilities rather than developing a broader skill set. You can invest up to 12 skill points in a single ability, and the level 12 version will be far more powerful than the comparatively weak level 1 version, which is fine at the start of the game but which really won’t cut it later on. So of course you figure out which of the skills are going to be the most useful and reserve your skill points for those, and those alone. This is bad for two reasons: one is that, again, your level ups are reduced to boosting the stats of a skill you already have instead of unlocking anything new, and the other is that by level 35 I had a grand total of four active skills sitting on a 10-slot skillbar. Remember, this isn’t like Diablo where you can chop and change runes to fundamentally change your skills and your equipment will provide further skill- and build-altering abilities: a level 12 skill does exactly the same thing as a level 1 skill, it just has more numbers attached to it. That’s just boring.

Kenti: I have probably said it before and I will say it again – either let the players effortlessly re-skill their characters so they can work out what works best for them and what’s fun to play with, or make the impact of making irreversible choices equally dramatic and very very very obvious upfront. Diablo 3 (sorry!) and Victor Vran (again… has to be said) both choose the former option, with skills being very easy to swap out in Diablo 3 and Victor Vran basing it all in equipment so you just mix and match what you’re wearing to do different builds. I have heard countless arguments about living with your choices and the importance of not making it so you re-skill your character for every specific encounter, but frankly I very firmly believe that any difficulty based on making things hard and cumbersome are just tedious and unfun. The permanent option is fine as long as you make anything you choose big, dramatic and balanced. Yes, Grim Dawn offers you the ability to reclaim skill points, but you have to pay increasingly more for every one you take back, so there is no easy way to try out different combinations, and the developers clearly don’t want you to. This is not a good thing.

Hentzau: Hey, at least we just found a use for the money. I don’t think the cost on respeccing skill points was particularly onerous, but the big problem with it was that while you could get back the points you’d invested in individual skills, any points you’d spent on the passive Skill Mastery of upgrading a class’s basic attributes (which as we’ve covered is the dullest thing you can spend them on) were permanently locked in. I can’t actually see a good reason for Grim Dawn to do this, except that it fundamentally has a problem with how easy modern ARPGs make things for the player and is deliberately tossing obstacles in their path in the mistaken belief that that’s what made older ARPGs such as Diablo 2 fun.

Kenti: There are other ways to do difficulty and challenges, and it’s usually best when you present it as something on the players’ own terms. Grim Dawn did have a few of these things – optional areas with higher-level content, and a sort of challenge-dungeon (we found one, I assume there is more?) where you can’t Town Portal back and are faced with high-level opponents.

Hentzau: That was fun! It was probably the best part of the game that we played, because it was a) something entirely optional, b) something Diablo 3 didn’t do, and c) actually had a decent payoff at the end. Although that last one was more the loot RNG actually giving me something decent for once, it felt appropriate. Regardless, it was a 3-4 level dungeon filled with high level enemies and no respawns. For once the game felt risky and challenging rather than a braindead monster mash. Grim Dawn needed far more of these moments to establish its own identity as something new and different rather than presenting itself as a throwback to an earlier era.

Kenti: I think ultimately that’s all that there is to be said for Grim Dawn. Had it come out a few years after Titan Quest, it would have been considered a fun extension and continuation of those ideas. So many years on, despite the attempts to drag the genre kicking and screaming into better design decisions, so few games have actually thought it through and taken a brave approach. Grim Dawn has played it far too safe, and has looked on the past far too nostalgically.

Hentzau: One thing to be said for Grim Dawn is that it’s making me think far more fondly of Victor Vran.

Kenti: Indeed, it showed than an indie crack at the genre is possible, even with an entirely generic setting. Victor Vran was fun – it had lots of cool ideas, and it stuck to its own path. It followed  the idea of new and interesting design, but without resorting to using Diablo 3’s new and interesting design.

Hentzau: It was still entirely disposable, mind, but I don’t regret the time spent playing Victor Vran at all. I don’t think I can really say the same for Grim Dawn, except that it functions as living proof that rose-tinted glasses are a very, very real thing.

Kenti: There are bits of Grim Dawn I enjoyed, but I am somewhat remorseful about a lot of it, and certainly somewhat begrudge the price tag. It did not provide me with 6 pints’ worth of entertainment.

Hentzau: It’s actually kind of rare that I invest more than two or three hours into a game without finishing it, but that’s what I’m doing with Grim Dawn. I can’t face the slog through to the end of the game, even though it looks like it’s only a couple more hours. So certainly towards the end I’d question whether the word “entertainment” was really appropriate; I did have some fun with it at the start before its largely self-imposed limitations had started to show through, but it definitely became a chore to play later. Fortunately, since it is a video game released in a month that’s as overpopulated with other, more interesting-looking video games as I can remember, that’s not a chore I have to carry on doing and I have no qualms about dropping it to move onto more promising, less Grim pastures.

The post Thoughts: Grim Dawn appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Yeah, I’m basically reviewing Orcs Must Die 2 just so that I can do that pun. I have dragooned my regular co-op partner Kenti into helping me out with this one. Say hello, Kenti.

Kenti: Hello there. I play games with other humans.

Hentzau: But only humans. Because you hate computers. You’re a computer…cist.

Kenti: It’s true. Sometimes when my voice synthesizer doesn’t work I refuse to talk to the humans. They must intimate my intent purely from the actions of my on-screen characters. This occasionally makes Hentzau swear and complain about being lonely. (So the plan is working perfectly).

Hentzau: Yes, for my part I don’t hate computers. I just hate you. However, I also hate orcs. Oh, how I hate them.

Kenti: They must die. It is the only way.

Hentzau: Indeed they must. In quite prodigious — one might even say extravagant — quantities. The original Orcs Must Die provided for this particular vice quite admirably, but it nevertheless fell short in several ancillary areas, consisting as it did of a simple linear campaign with no challenge levels or multiplayer or anything. Once you were done with the campaign then bam, that was it. No real reason to go back. It was functional, it was enjoyable, but it definitely felt like it could do with a bit of fattening up to provide a more comprehensive orc-slaying experience.

Kenti: I think it is fair to say that after playing the first iteration, both of us agreed emphatically on the fact that the cherry on top of this murder cake had to be some form of multiplayer. It did clearly feel like an iteration, the development team’s first shot across the bow to stretch their game development muscles.

Hentzau: For me it wasn’t so much the lack of multiplayer as the complete absence of any sort of survival/high score mode. That both are present in the sequel is a sure sign that Robot Entertainment were aware that the first iteration of OMD was very much the Lite version of the game. The sequel feels like the full release.

Kenti:*protracted silence*

Hentzau: Let’s talk about the co-op first, shall we?

Kenti: Yes. Because for me that was definitely the most attractive and exciting of the new features. I was satisfied enough by the first OMD’s proof of concept, but this, I was sure, would make the fun pop out in glorious 3D. I think it did – there is always a certain amount of extra fun that co-operative play always adds, but unlike some of the games we have played together, it didn’t actively work to subtract that fun. Although I have enjoyed playing the other modes alone, I think co-op stands as the more complete experience. Not to say that there wasn’t something missing in the tactics department. When alone, you get a large number of slots to equip gadgets in, when playing co-operatively, you get just over half the slots each.

Hentzau: In theory this should promote intelligent trap selection with each player taking traps, trinkets and weapons that’ll complement the other player’s traps and abilities. However, I at least found it didn’t quite work out that way thanks to both an incredibly irritating UI decision that I’ll go into more depth on later (you have no idea how I am going to go into depth on this) and the difficulty of coordinating some good synergies when your voice communication is only going one way. EH KENTI.

Kenti: Your turmoil pleases my circuits greatly. I think on the first two thirds of the levels we maybe communicated on trap choices once. The last few levels did require us to think a little more about how we were individually and collectively going to tackle the challenge – I wanted to feel that from map 3 or 4. Perhaps that is necessary for the hardest difficulty level (Nightmare), but one would expect it to feature more in the co-op play of the standard difficulty level.

Hentzau: Most of my objections to OMD 2 arise not from the gameplay itself, but from the way the metagame elements are set up. Here, you have the problem that — with the sole exception of two levels near the end — all the campaign levels are pathetically easy for two players to complete. Having an extra pair of hands available to help stem the green tide flooding towards your rift makes a huge difference. The thing here is that while Nightmare mode is genuinely harder, with far more enemies and enemy types, it doesn’t unlock until you’ve completed the game on normal. This is puzzling to me; rather than give you the option to get murdered on a higher difficulty level from the outset if you really want to, OMD 2 instead forces you to splash around in the kiddie pool for six hours no matter how good you actually are at the game.

Kenti: Orcs Must Die, but at a measured and manageable pace. There must be some sort of Orc Murder Control Agency.

Hentzau: In order to qualify for your grown-up orc-killing licence you first have to pass the game’s version of a cycling proficiency test. Quite frankly if you hadn’t been around to poke me through co-op I think I might just have stayed in Endless mode. Except of course I couldn’t, because a lot of the trap unlocks are also linked to progression in the campaign. You basically have to play it in order to get the most out of the other modes. It’s more than a little bit obnoxious.

Kenti: That’s not to say that co-op wasn’t fun, at least in my case. I found it an incredibly enjoyable process and it certainly rates high in the Championship of Co-operative Games.

Hentzau: For the host, anyway.

Kenti: It is not my fault that my pristine broadband tubes are far superior to those a fleshling can install in themselves. Put some optics in your toes: then you can host.

Hentzau: My connection woes had sod-all to do with my internet, which runs literally every other co-op experience under the sun with a minimum of fuss. I am therefore forced to point the finger of blame for the game’s second-plus lag times, teleporting ogres, ice-skating orcs and regular disconnects squarely at OMD 2’s netcode. Maybe it was just me and everyone else is having a wonderful time with it, but as the non-host half of this partnership it put a significant damper on my co-op experience since it pretty much ensured I couldn’t rely on weapons. Like, at all. Couldn’t hit a thing with them; the crossbow headshot system is amazingly crap anyway but this basically reduced things to “fire randomly at horde at roughly head height, hope for the best”. There were even a couple of times where I had to query you as to whether or not my traps were working because I simply couldn’t tell.  It wasn’t impressive.

Kenti: So what has OMD2 added to the actual gameplay itself? Apparently more environmental traps, including the largely autonomous minecarts whizzing around the earlier levels and the player-activated spike-rollers, mine-carts full or hot coals and so forth. These are placed strategically across levels to give you just that little bit of an advantage against the relentless tide. Great! But they aren’t really useful for your typical destructive needs – they are not as reliable and conveniently located as traps you can place yourself, nor are they as precise as your personal attention to orc death – you can’t be sure it will take care of the problem. I ended up relying on traps I could place and spells I could shoot, the environmental traps were a curiosity and little more.

Hentzau: I think part of the problem here is that the pressure the orc hordes were exerting on us never got to the point where we needed the extra edge the environmental traps provided. They’re simply not necessary, and so while the automated minecarts are a nice little bonus the rest of the environment features went unused

Kenti: Even when the situation does get high pressured — such as on Endless — either I had the autonomous carts help thin out the hordes, or I had no time to set up the shots at the right time for a questionable amount of orc damage.

Hentzau: I’ve made good use of certain well-placed boulder traps and rolling logs on Endless, but on the whole I agree with you. Even the minecarts hinder more than they help, with the tracks taking up valuable floorspace and the carts themselves exploding your painstakingly-positioned boom barrels if they so much as graze them.

Kenti: They have also given us more placeable traps and weapons. There are some new traps that only the new character, the Sorceress, can use such as the Acid Trap or Ice Vent. I certainly found these more interesting than some of the more basic traps of the original (the War Mage still gets the original Arrow Trap and Tar Pit) and they formed the core of my arsenal against the orcs. The new Scepter of Domination was also great fun as it allowed me to briefly convert an orc to my control and cause them to explode in a deadly manner if killed. Entertaining AND a lifesaver. There were also general new traps such as the Haymaker (placed on the ceiling and invited to thrash orcs about in a circular manner) and…

Hentzau: Does this mean I can talk about SKULL REFUND ARMAGEDDON now?

Kenti: Er… go ahead. I’ll go grab a drink of oil. Is that what they put inside machines?

Hentzau: Okay, so, the Weavers from the first game have been defenestrated and replaced with the skull currency system. For the sequel you give your traps passive upgrades by spending skulls you earn through the simple process of playing the game. Skulls are earned through killing x number of orcs, surviving y number of waves, and finishing the level in z amount of time with Ω rift points remaining. In order to be fully effective as a War Mage/Sorceress you need enough skulls to fully upgrade ten traps/weapons/trinkets, which I think works out to about 250 in total. This takes a while, and makes the initial stages of OMD 2 a somewhat grindy system, but I don’t think it’s a bad change. It’s a change that I actually endorse, on the whole, since it means that even a failed Endless attempt will give you some skulls for your trouble.

Kenti: The upgrade system does add a little bit of extra faff that is usually a good break from the action. It’s the same reason that people like equipping things in RPGs or getting new guns or whatever else. You get to make your traps a little more effective, get slightly different effects from your weapons and generally do things a bit differently.

Hentzau: Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. If that’s how it had actually turned out, I would have zero problem with the system whatsoever. Unfortunately the entire thing is undone by one of the biggest own goals I can remember seeing in a recent game. The skull system is supposed to promote experimentation and a lot of testing traps together to find out what fits and which trap/weapon combos will lead to high scores and big bucks. The developers have made some provision for a player who tries out a new trap, decides he doesn’t like it, and wants some way to get back the skulls he invested in upgrading it. At any time, and as many times as you like, you can refund the skulls you spent putting new bells and whistles on your orc grinding machine.

Except, in a truly baffling example of a developer making things difficult for the player for no other reason than because they can, you can’t refund the skulls spent on just one trap. Oh no. That would be too simple. If you want those skulls back then you have to block refund everything. All the skulls you ever spent on every single trap you spent them on; if you hit that refund button your entire setup ends up totally erased. If you decide to try out the new Void Wall trap only to find it wanting and now want to put those skulls back into the Boom Barrel Dispenser, you have to wipe your entire finely-tuned trap spec out of existence and then spend five minutes trying to remember exactly where you spent those 250-odd skulls all over again. It’s such a pain to do this every single time you want to try out a new trap that it actively discourages experimentation and tinkering with different trap combos. I can’t think of a good reason why Robot would decide to do this, except maybe that they secretly hate everyone who buys their games and did it out of sheer spite.

Kenti: Now, either someone up the design chain didn’t think this through, or (knowing how development works) there was some sort of technical issue that prevented it being done the sane and sensible way. Not excusable though, because the end product simply discourages you from experimenting too much and thus tentatively keeps you away from a higher orc-murder count. The Orc Murder Control Agency strikes again?

Hentzau: I mean the actual gameplay part of OMD 2 is outstanding, it’s just that whenever you’re outside that the game is hell-bent on making things as difficult for you as possible. As I said, it’s utterly baffling to me why they would do this.

Kenti: Monsters! It’s not just orcs. We’ve been lying to you this whole dieorcblog. As in the first OMD, you get to kill things that are not orcs and they are not as optional as the name might suggest. There are the old ogres, kobolds, gnolls and the like as well as the new Earth Elementals, Trolls, Gnoll Grenadiers and Shamans. All of which are really really annoying in a positive way, pushing you to work that extra bit harder to destroy all things that are not you. Earth Elementals shatter into progressively smaller versions of themselves, trolls have predictable but really really annoying regeneration and Shamans… what do shamans do? I remember killing them but they never once upset the acid cart.

Hentzau: Shamans periodically resurrect any recently killed baddie that you haven’t gibbed to full health. This includes super-baddies like Armoured Ogres and Mountain Trolls, so they can potentially be a massive pain if left to their own devices.

Kenti: Ah. I think most of my eradication methods involve the utter disintegration of the subject in question. Robot efficiency you see.

Hentzau: I like most of the new monster additions. They keep you on your toes; elemental mitosis has to be dealt with in a controlled fashion, trolls must be burned or frozen to halt their regenerative abilities and the shamans… well, you just shoot those first.

Kenti: The flyers are still pointless though. They were just a nuisance that you either had to take care of personally or appoint lots of archer guardians to deal with in OMD and in OMD2… that’s pretty much the same. They don’t really add a good challenge, they have wings and you just make sure to kill them off and that’s that.

Hentzau: Eh, I found that while flyers were present they weren’t particularly overused, and all but the ice bats could be one-shotted by a blast of the ice amulet. Where monsters are concerned I reserve my ire for the cyclops mage, who I think must have been coded by the same guy responsible for skull refunds and the difficulty progression. Cyclops mages are very tough, fire homing missiles that will always hit you unless you get out of range (and they have a very long range), count as large monsters so they can’t be flipped or pushed into acid, and have tiny tiny heads making the freeze/headshot combo used to down most large enemies entirely useless. They are utterly unfun to fight and the only enemy I’d be entirely happy to never encounter again.

Kenti: Tell you what though – the story is absolutely roaring. There are trial, tribulations, problems that our brave protagonist and anti-hero must overc-

Hentzau: Oh be quiet. OMD 2 wisely doesn’t waste any time on a plot beyond “The Sorceress somehow survived and the War Mage is still a boorish dick, and together they kill orcs,” and the game is better for it.

Kenti: It is present but discreet. What little script they have written aims for levity and that’s just fine.

Hentzau: In the main, though, OMD 2 really is just a collection of well-designed orc killing boxes, something that’s particularly emphasised in Endless mode. Endless mode is, for me, the meat of any tower defence game, in which you set up the best system of traps you possibly can and have it gradually tested to destruction by ever-increasing hordes of baddies. It’s here that most of the trap experimentation really becomes necessary (although it’s still a massive pain) as each level requires a different set of traps to maximise your killing potential. My most recent discovery is that arrow traps will set off boom barrels from boom barrel dispensers, allowing you to instantly carpet bomb an area using the trap reset trinket power. Prior to that I was trying to perfect a spring trap/wall void combo to basically automatically toss the orcs into a black hole as they walked past it. This playing with different layouts and setups is, to me, the reason tower defence games exist, and the addition of Endless mode means it’s something that OMD finally caters for.

Kenti: Endless feels like a good challenge/puzzle and I can see myself working away at perfecting the orc-killing grids for some time. If that’s not quite enough to satisfy your orcs-be-gone needs, you can also play though the Classic levels from OMD if you also own OMD. I’ve been enjoying tackling them as the Sorceress as they present a slightly different challenge in this than they did in OMD – they are genuinely worth replaying.

Kenti: In the field of tower-defense hybrids it is certainly now the king sitting atop a mountainous throne of orc corpses. Sanctum was an excellent proof of the concept but it was dry and lifeless, sticking too rigidly to the conventions of the classic tower defense genre. Dungeon Defenders, although it went for the ‘cheery’ approach to its graphics and tone was all too obsessed with the loot rather than the levels and creative solutions to the orc problem. OMD’s aesthetic treatment is far more preferable too, being easier on the eye and softer on the ear, the only thing that OMD 2 doesn’t have that was great in Dungeon Defenders is bosses. Even there I am in two minds over just how much fun that actually added to the latter.

Hentzau: For my part II find OMD 2 to be a far more comprehensive experience compared to the first game. It still has some room for improvement/additional content via DLC or expansion packs (although if they don’t make patching out the absurd all-or-nothing skull refund system their first order of business those are very definitely going to remain unbought) but otherwise it feels pretty much done this time around.

Kenti: Would I disappoint and hurt you by saying that they have released the first patch already and they haven’t improved the skull refund issue?

Hentzau: That was a hotfixy patch. I expect it to be in the first proper patch they release, or there’s going to be trouble.

Kenti: I am sad this causes you no pain.

Hentzau: The skull refund system causes me pain, Kenti, and when I say “there’s going to be trouble” there what I actually mean is that I’m going to delete the game and then retire to my room to weep over a Diet Coke as I consider the intrinsic cruelty of the world and everything in it.

Kenti: Good enough for me.

The post Dieorcblog: Orcs Must Die 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.